Concurrent Object-oriented Design Patterns
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What is the Concurrent Design Pattern Framework?The Concurrent Design Pattern Framework is a set of implicitly-concurrent versions of Gang-of-Four (GOF) object-oriented design patterns for which the use of the pattern in a system automatically introduces potential parallelism. About the Concurrent Design Pattern FrameworkThe broad objective of the Panini project is to reconcile the modularity goals promoted by good software design practices with the concurrency goals of exposing potential parallelism between the execution of components. The main idea is that if programmers improve the modularity of their programs they should get concurrency for free. The Concurrent Design Pattern Framework is a work in progress representing one direction of our efforts to reconcile modularity and concurrency goals by enhancing Gang-of-Four (GOF) object-oriented design patterns. GOF patterns are commonly used to improve the modularity of object-oriented software. These patterns describe strategies to decouple components in design space and specify how these components should interact. Our hypothesis is that if these patterns are enhanced to also decouple components in execution space, applying them will concomitantly improve the design and potentially available concurrency in software systems. For 18 out of the 23 GOF patterns, we have determined that, subject to appropriate usage, our hypothesis is true. For each of these 18 patterns we have created an enhanced version of the pattern in which use of the pattern increases potential concurrency without additional, explicit effort on the part of the developer to do so. In every case but one, the concurrency-related concerns (such as thread creation and synchronization) are fully encapsulated in a library that we provide, and in no case is the developer ever required to explicitly create a thread or acquire a synchronization lock. Getting Started with the Concurrent Design Pattern FrameworkFor a detailed discussion and usage examples for the Concurrent Design Pattern Framework please see our technical report. An archive including the libraries and examples of the 18 enhanced patterns is available here. You can browse the README file. |
Department of Computer Science
These pages describe work carried out on the Panini project, whose goals are to reconcile modularity and concurrency. This work is supported in part by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants CCF-14-23370, CCF-11-17937, CCF-10-17334, and a CAREER award 08-46059 to Hridesh Rajan. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.